Lexington

Terrible swift sword

It was never supposed to fall on the Defence Department itself

IN THE summer of 2010 Admiral Mike Mullen, then still chairman of America's joint chiefs of staff, said that the biggest security threat facing the nation was the national debt. The proposition that military strength depends in the long run on economic health is hardly controversial. But the admiral cannot have foreseen the astonishing sequence of budget negotiations that have paralysed Congress this past year. In the latest twist this week, Democrats and Republicans on Congress's so-called “supercommittee” failed to agree on a plan to reduce the budget deficit, thereby exposing the defence budget to the prospect of a decade's worth of deep spending cuts.

The Budget Control Act that Congress passed in August stipulated that if the supercommittee failed, government spending would be cut automatically by some $1.2 trillion, with the axe falling most heavily on the Pentagon. Add this “sequestration” to the $350 billion of cuts already agreed on this summer, and the Defence Department is looking at losing up to $1 trillion, almost a fifth of the total, from its spending plans in the ten years from 2013. Leon Panetta, Barack Obama's defence secretary, calls the consequences “devastating”. At the end of the ten years, he says, the United States would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the fewest ships since 1915 and the smallest air force in its history. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans, claim that America would face a “swift decline as the world's leading military power”.

Plenty of defence wonks agree. “The future of America's national security hangs in the balance,” say the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation and the Foreign Policy Initiative, a group of right-leaning think-tanks that have banded together to “defend defence”. At the Brookings Institution, Michael O'Hanlon, like Mr Panetta a Democrat, is also worried. Even without the extra burden of sequestration, he argues, the $350 billion reduction already agreed would cut into muscle, not just fat. America might no longer be able to meet its “irreducible” defence needs, such as winding down the Iraqi and Afghan wars responsibly, deterring Iran, hedging against a rising China, protecting the sea lanes and keeping terrorists at bay.

All this sounds a mite alarmist. People close to the Defence Department have a habit of overreacting to cuts, and if these are as damaging as advertised they are unlikely to happen. Great nations decline in different ways: by losing wars, overreaching, collapsing internally. But it would be extraordinary if America sacrificed its position as the world's leading military power as the result of a legislative accident. And this would be an accident. Nobody intended the provisions of the Budget Control Act to be enacted. The law was a pistol Congress pointed at its own head in order to frighten itself into cutting the deficit. Mandatory defence cuts were designed to scare the Republicans; mandatory cuts in other programmes were supposed to scare the Democrats. In the event Congress failed to scare itself enough, which means that it reached no agreement, so the pistol might go off after all.

But will it? Congress has a year to take evasive action before sequestration bites. Senators McCain and Graham say that the cuts “cannot be allowed to occur”. Howard McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is threatening legislation to block them. Congress does, after all, have the power to amend or repeal its own law, though Barack Obama has the veto, and has promised to use it should Congress try to dodge the bullet. He may relish the chance to cut defence spending and blame the Republicans for it.

The likeliest outcome is therefore neither a sudden, history-altering reduction in defence spending, nor a quick fix that lets Congress wriggle out of its trap, but a drawn-out and perhaps salutary election-year debate about how much defence to buy at a time of distress. The defenders of defence have strong arguments. America spends less than 5% of GDP on defence, more than most countries but less than the highs of 9% it reached in the 1960s. Health and pensions, not defence, are the real drivers of the deficit. But one of the most interesting things about this debate may well be the changing stance of the Republican Party.

A wobble in the Grand Old Party

The day after the supercommittee said it had failed, eight Republican presidential candidates took part in a “national security debate” in Washington, DC. Mitt Romney spoke vehemently against the defence cuts, but Newt Gingrich declined to agree that all military savings were unacceptable, and Ron Paul questioned their true magnitude. Neither Grover Norquist, he of the notorious anti-tax pledge, nor the tea-party movement, sees a reason to exempt the Pentagon from the general fiscal austerity. FreedomWorks, an advocacy group, has just issued a “tea-party budget”. This embraces a plan by Tom Coburn, a conservative senator from Oklahoma, for $1 trillion of defence cuts over the decade.

All this adds up to what Senator Graham considers a profound change within his party. He was aghast when its leadership made defence into the supercommittee's hostage, claiming that Ronald Reagan would never have done such a thing. But the Reagan era is long gone, and Robert Gates, the (Republican) defence secretary who stayed on to serve Mr Obama for two years, summed up the new thinking when he asked: “Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the United States' battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners?”.

America is not about to throw away its military pre-eminence, either by accident or design. But the fat years are over, and the failure of the supercommittee may accidentally have given its politicians an incentive to answer such questions seriously.